Our beehives are the heart of our business, they provide us with a living and in return we provide them with a home and year round care and attention.
We endeavour to run our hives in a way that allows the bees to live how they naturally would.
One of our points of difference with the way we run our hives is that we leave the bees with around 30KG of their own honey for the winter, many take this in pursuit of extra profit but we have noticed our hives are stronger and healthier through winter and into spring and therefore are able to gather more when the flowers bloom.
Our beehives are our passion and part of the Mason bros honey team.
We are planting native and exotic bee friendly trees on our farm where we are based and encourage our farmers to do the same. This will allow honey bees to flourish and also provide food for the native bees and birds of Aotearoa New Zealand.
As a sideline to producing honey we also rear queen bees for local beekeepers They are available when the hives are active and drone bees are about in spring from September-November and in Autumn from January to early March.
Our queens are naturally open mated in four frame, full depth hives. They are NZ Italian queens with good honey gathering genes. Mated queens are $50+GST (+postage) We also produce 9-10 day old queen cells ready for pickup. Queen cells are $6+GST
In the construction of our beehives we endeavour to use as much timber as possible.
A lot of the timber we use is milled on our own mill from trees grown on our parent’s farm. We are also replanting native and exotic trees on our parents’ farm and our headquarters to complete the sustainable cycle. These trees will sequester carbon as they grow, provide food for bees and native birds and be available for use in future beehive construction once they reach maturity. We also encourage our farmers to plant native trees on their land or allow marginal hilly land to revert to native bush.
